1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to video processing and particularly to a video stabilization method.
2. Description of the Related Art
The acquisition of digital video usually suffers from undesirable camera jitters due to unstable random camera motions, which are produced by a hand-held camera or a camera in a vehicle moving on a non-smooth road or terrain.
In the past decade, demand for video stabilization has capable of eliminating video motion vibrations, common in non-professional home videos, has increased greatly. A number of methods have been proposed to reduce irregular motion perturbations in video. Morimoto and Chellappa, in “Automatic digital image stabilization,” IEEE Intern. Conf. on Pattern Recognition, pp. 660-665, 1997, proposed use of a 2D rigid motion model in combination with a pyramid structure to compute motion vectors with sub-pixel accuracy. Then a global motion model is used as an affine motion model to represent rotational and translational camera motions.
Chen, in “Video stabilization algorithm using a block-based parametric motion model”, EE392J Project Report, Winter 2000, used a block-based motion estimation in conjunction with an affine motion model to compute the camera motion model from consecutive frames, followed by smoothing the sets of affine motion parameters along a timeline. Additionally, Litvin et al., in “Probabilistic video stabilization using Kalman filtering and mosaicking,” In IS&T/SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, Image and Video Communications and Proc., Jan. 20-24, 2003, employed a probabilistic model for camera motion and applied the Kalman filter to reduce motion noise and obtain stabilized camera motion.
However, conventional methods are not robust and efficient, and lack consideration of regularization between undefined regions and motion smoothness. Therefore, the present invention provides a real-time robust video stabilization method to remove undesirable jitter motions and produce a stabilized video.